Military settings and keeping your economy moving

Two questions come up once the first flags are down: how do the military sliders behave, and why does the economy feel slow when nothing looks broken. Both answers come from the same tables the simulation itself reads — pace and expansion are the same problem from two sides.

The military sliders

This port exposes the same eight sliders the original did: recruiting ratio, defenders kept in the store, defence strength, attack strength, and four separate occupation levels for buildings far from the border, mid-distance, near the border, and on a harbour. Each ships with a default value out of its own maximum; the exact numbers are on the military encyclopedia page, generated straight from the same constants the game runs with, rather than repeated here.

One default explains a common surprise: the far-from-border occupation slider starts at its minimum, the near-border one at its maximum — the game ships assuming thin interior garrisons and a heavy frontier, not the other way round. If your interior buildings feel understaffed while a distant frontier tower is full, that is the slider working as designed, and it is one you can turn without touching anything else.

Garrison size is a property of the building, not the slider: a barracks, guardhouse, watchtower and fortress hold different numbers of soldiers and coin slots, and coins are what promote a garrison one rank at a time. See buildings for the per-building numbers.

Building ratios that matter early

The chain that decides how fast anything else gets built starts with wood. A woodcutter's hut produces wood from standing trees; a forester produces nothing catchable at all — its whole job is planting new trees so the woodcutter has something to cut next season. Skip the forester and a woodcutter empties its own hillside and goes idle.

Wood has three competing buyers: the sawmill, the charburner and the vineyard. When more than one wants wood at once, the transport system splits it by a fixed weighting rather than first-come-first-served, and the sawmill's share is by far the largest — exactly right early on, since boards are the currency of everything else. A sawmill turns wood into boards, and boards are split again between building sites, the metalworks, the shipyard and the tannery, with building sites getting the largest share by default. That is why a stalled building site usually traces back to a starved sawmill rather than to the site itself. The buildings and wares pages list the exact costs, producers and consumers for this and every other chain in the game.

Expanding territory

Territory in this port is held by buildings, not drawn by hand. A military building's reach depends on its size — a barracks holds a smaller radius than a guardhouse, less than a watchtower, less than a fortress — and the headquarters holds a fixed radius of its own, bigger than a barracks but smaller than a fortress. A military building claims none of that land until a soldier actually occupies it; an empty shell just built holds nothing.

Putting up, capturing or losing a building of this kind does not nudge the border — it recomputes ownership from scratch for every territory-holding building in an enlarged area around it. Practically, the fastest way to push a border outward is not a bigger army camped at home, it is a bigger military building, occupied, further out than the ones you already have.

Reading the signs

None of this replaces the two diagnostics the earlier guides already give you. Roads, flags and carriers explains how goods piling up at a flag point straight at the weak segment of your network — often where a stalled production chain shows itself first. Where you can build explains how to read the construction aid before you commit a scarce castle site to the wrong building. This guide is the third leg, for when the bottleneck is not the road or the site but the pace of the economy and the reach of your own border.